Optical microresonators with coupled waveguide. (Image: DESY)
Tobias Herr, an expert in ultrafast photonics at DESY Photon Science and the University of Hamburg, has secured funding with his research group to advance their work on microresonators. The €150,000 Proof-of-Concept grant from the European Research Council (ERC) is the first of its kind at DESY. Proof-of-Concept grants are designed to prepare ERC-funded research projects for commercial exploitation or societal application. The team's research could dramatically improve mobile communications, autonomous mobility technologies and data infrastructure by substantially reducing the background noise that currently limits existing technologies.
Many technologies such as telecommunications, radar, navigation systems and data networks rely on specialised circuits that generate very fast, regular electrical signals. These "clock" circuits are based on microwave oscillators. Some of these are fairly compact, which makes them attractive for widespread use – but the technology often reaches its limits because random fluctuations, or noise, hinder their deployment in emerging applications such as 6G wireless networks, self-driving cars and large AI data centres.
There is a technique that uses ultra-stable laser light and divides its very high optical frequency down into the microwave range to achieve much lower-noise signals. However, so far this only works in the laboratory; moreover, these systems are bulky, consume a lot of power and are expensive. There have already been initial attempts to integrate this technique directly onto chips. "These attempts have shown that such systems can in principle be miniaturised using photonic integrated circuits – chips that guide and process light rather than electrical current – but they still require a lot of bulky equipment around the tiny chip," explains scientist Tobias Herr.
This is where his group's "pureWAVE" project comes in. It aims to overcome this limitation and implement the technique entirely on a scalable photonic chip platform. If this concept works as intended, it could significantly reduce the noise that directly limits performance in communication and sensing applications compared to state-of-the-art purely electronic oscillators
As part of the Proof-of-Concept project, the team plans to build a prototype of this chip-scale oscillator and derive design rules through modelling and laboratory experiments. "If the project is successful, pureWAVE will deliver chip-scale oscillators characterised by significantly lower phase noise,” says Britta Redlich, Director of Photon Science at DESY. "This promises breakthrough advances in telecommunications, autonomous mobility technologies and high-performance data infrastructure."
(from DESY News)
